Tuesday, November 12, 2013

And this is the planet that UFOs find interesting?

NASA's photograph of the Earth from Saturn -- that little white speck: the planet that galactic civilizations and cultures have found so interesting and outstanding that the inhabitants of those civilizations (extraterrestrials) have sent a plethora of UFOs (or flying saucers) here to check it out, for years now.

Should we laugh or cry....at the ridiculousness of that ufological idea?

27 Comments:

PHOTO CAPTION:

"Bzghitor, call Reticuli Command and tell them we see a dot. Can't tell if it's capable of hosting life but we don't want to get any closer -- they might have nuclear weapons, of which we are so very concerned. Tell command we require new orders. Now, let's go into stasis for 78 years while we await a reply."

In our own planet thousands of tourists, workers and scientists from well developed and wealthy countries travel to countries that can be considered poorly developed, small, poor, apparently uninteresting, etc.

I am not sure if that proportional image is large enough to qualify as a speck of dust.For some of us, (probably the majority) view this perspective as humbling evidence of our speck being as far from being exceptionally extraordinary as we could imagine, on our best day. What is extraordinary cannot be captured on a Kodachrome slide, bendable metal, or by suggestion and inference..as the visions that have danced and flitted around our skies are as incommensurable as to any purpose we could assign to ourselves, or to the impetus that created them.It as complex and as simple as that. No amount of inflated, melodramatic gnashing of teeth can talk it's way out of the subject being held in suspension for a lack of a prosaic framework to domesticate it with.I sometimes wonder if the entire phenomenon is a remote broadcast that has no meaning in of itself but rather serves as a platform to balance our own improbable existence on the vehicle that is a speck of dust. To overly inflate ourselves as to our importance has always been a good defense against despair.

Rich:We dont really know how developed can be the technology for space travel used by other civilizations. If some of these civilizations are advanced enough, it could be pretty easy for them to travel, and ergo they could have embassies in every planet with life on this galaxy. After all, uninteresting as we might be, we already have atomic bombs and could become dangerous at some point in the future.

An Atomic Bomb or two, going off on Earth, in the context of the whole Universe or even our own galaxy, would go virtually unnoticed; there are too many other cosmological events that are superior in effect.

No advanced alien culture, it seems to me, would be overly concerned about what's going on in this dingy world....advanced is the key word here.

The only thing that might prove interesting to an advanced civilization is our species lack of any predatory behavior toward us as we ourselves advanced technologically, and yet we are seemingly programmed to keep the ecology balanced by self harvesting behaviors, which seem to increase as we threaten the existence of the whole system. In the face of increasingly dire, solid evidence that we are extinguishing any hope of our being able to sustain this bizarre myopia, we compound the odds against us as if in a dream. This would perhaps be somewhat interesting as watching a car crash in slow motion but I think also it would be too morbid an exercise to sustain interest.

dear Rich, it's not a matter of earthcentrism, but the natural curiosity and quest for knowledge which enabled us to evolve from caves to starships.I know peoples which dedicated their life to study ants of Borneo or magic rituals of south africa bushmen.why potential evolved alien beings should be different?

...while I must agree with all(!) of your statements here, I also think I need to point out to you that the simple fact of HOW we dopey humans managed to organize and cooperate enough to actually OBTAIN said photos MAY actually make us somewhat interesting, potentialwise...?

Don't expect the arrival to the Earth of a whole civilization. That would be absurd. But you may expect the arrival of individuals or crews of tourists, zoologists, botanists, sociologists, hunters, vigilants, etc.

Returning to the atomic bomb example: Certainly their weaponry maybe much more advanced than ours. But the only way for them to know what kind ofweaponry we have, is they to come here.

Sorry but Hynek was just an astronomer. Usually, Astronomers are pretty ignorant about physics of interstellar travel. Michio kaku... a real physicist believes that interstellar travel is possible. The same goes for Stanton Friedman. The same goes for space and rocket scientists. They are optimistic. Astronomets dont count... they just seat and watch their telescopes... at most they watch photos taken from telescopes located in the space... thanks to the rocket scientists...

I read Kaku's book Physics of the Impossible... and he lists interstellar travel an impossible for now...but not for the future...in that book he even gave a not so negative opinion on ufos. Friedman usually gives various examples of astronomers who have declared impossible such things as airplanes and travel to the moon.

For an opinion on possible interstellar travel ask a modern physicist or an aerospace engineer or scientist. Don't ask astronomers or SETI proponents.

Limitations put by Einstein are not so bad. On one hand Eistenian Special Relativity limits the traveling speed to a maximum equal to the speed of light...this is the bad part. The good part is that the time experienced by a traveller cruising near the speed of light is shortened..so he does not feel a very long journey.

On the other hand...the more global Einstenian theory...called General Relativity, may allow for instant travelling by using the space-time curvature, Worm holes, etc.

Strictly speaking, General Relativity rules over Special Relativity, in the sense that Special Relativity does not apply all the time or everywhere. For example, given the expansion of the universe... some galaxies are getting farther from other galaxies at speeds exceeding the speed of light. This is a violation of the Special Relativity postulates, but actually happens.

If the universe violates Special Relativity...advanced technological civilizations might do something similar.

Some contrarily alternative thoughts regarding the subject..If we were to be surveyed, analysed and our ecology were probed, it would most likely to be accomplished by unmanned intelligent vehicles and if we were interesting in any sense and presented a provocation to their curiosity,it would be probably be due to a comparison on what would likely be, a vast difference in our biology which would parallel a difference in all aspects of what we call self awareness as well as process, sensory, communication etc as opposed from their own rather than our our anthropomorphic projections upon them as they being similar to ourselves and if that were the case, Another specimen in the old curiosity shop.However what strikes me is we speak of advanced civilizations when of course by the definition of civil in civilization that term as applied to us is a misnomer.

We speak of advanced in technological terms, an advanced civilization by that arbiter, might be advanced in a non technological sense.

Even Kaku has this bias of technology signifying advancement in his theoretical analysis of comparative musings, making the distinction, however, that a civilization must overcome it's own mastery of it to survive which is certainly based on us not the pejorative "them".

Another bias is that an advanced sentience requires "vehicles" to transverse space but then what we define as space, if you will in dimensional time is extremely biased due once again to our own biology.

In suspect that a highly evolved civilization which requires a corresponding self awareness would place art above technology, the creative expression as an extension of consciousness. They would rather soak in a work of the nature of the creator who synthesized it than a comparatively cruder expression in a propulsion system.It calls into question our definition of advanced..If we take this contrarily minority view further in our projections of ourselves as stereotypes for other species, it underlines a question that needs to be asked of ourselves..the definition of progress, what defines progress?

Not only are they not so bad, but General Relativity actually predicts many of the phenomena reported by UFO witnesses including: non-Newtonian flight profiles (sudden starts, stops, right angle turns, etc.), interaction with the environment via field effects (peaking of water underneath hovering UFOs, rustling of branches and grass, suppression of aerodynamic noise, sonic booms, and aerothermodynamic heating, etc.), intense self-luminosity, and “weird” phenomena such as “missing time”, objects appearing to be bigger on the inside than they are on the outside, sudden winking into and out of existence, moving from point A to point B without transiting through all the points in between, etc.

For a more complete discussion of this, I recommend reading Hal Puthoff’s “Advanced Space Propulsion Based on Vacuum (Spacetime Metric) Engineering” appearing in the Journal of the British Interplanetary Society (JBIS) Vol 63, pp 82-89, 2010.

Within that portion of the “Invisible College” that consists of theoretical physicists, it is commonly accepted that much of the core UFO phenomenon is explainable as someone having figured out how to construct “low-energy” Stargates. When I say “low-energy”, I’m implying the ability to create macroscopic regions of highly curved Spacetime using less than, say, 1 Jupiter mass-equivalent. There are a number of such physicists who see a theoretical basis for such conjecture. So, the theoretical understanding of WHAT is being observed is proceeding to a level and with a speed that is probably way beyond the lay person’s understanding.

Exactly HOW UFOs create “low-energy” Stargates is, of course, an unanswered question. My personal hunch is that it is not a purely technological process; I suspect it is mediated through advanced states of consciousness.

In any case, if the functioning of UFOs is basically an underappreciated consequence of General Relativity, that could have a number of implications for our understanding of the phenomenon. For example, the sudden upsurge in UFO reports during Einstein’s life may not be an accident if it turns out that the time interval between when General Relativity is first discovered as a scientific principle and when it is put to practical use is a short period. Other intelligences who had figured out how to move around within the spacetime matrix may have realized that Einstein’s intellect would soon give humans the ability to do the same. They would understandably have an interest in seeing to it that we understood and observed the rules of the road.

It is commonly assumed that the intelligence behind UFOs must be thousands, if not millions of years more advanced than we conventional humans, but there is no necessary reason why that should be so. From a strictly technological point of view, most metallic UFOs don’t look any more complicated than a 1940 Cyclotron, albeit with a nanotechnology-metamaterial external skin.

hmm. Well, your point is well taken. At the same time, i can't say that 'we' (western science) knows enough about how our universe is constructed (or what it even is) to endorse your point. What with estimates that dark matter constitutes upwards of 95% of the universe, the fact we don't have a great grasp on the nature of little factors like gravity or time, and that we've only been detecting other planets for around a decade - i don't feel we have the background to even say.

To someone in our position of knowledge, sure! How close is our position of knowledge to what actually is? who knows.

That said, on the topic of arguments against the ETH (which i take it is the underlying point of your post) i couldn't help but think of you, RR, while listening to an interview with Kathleen Marden on Beyond the Edge Radio's podcast of November 19, 2013. At a bit after the one hour two minute mark, Ms. Marden reveals that a couple of women who have been abducted found themselves infected with an STD after the experience (whilst celibate here on earth).

Whatever one thinks is going on with the abduction phenomenon, this report does not point to visitors from across the universe. Frankly, it sounds terrifyingly close to home. steph